At least, fundamentalists should steer clear of it. Indeed, the book convinced me-an ex-fundie who had to beg his parents for permission to listen to rock music-that the early fundamentalists had it right: Christians should steer clear of pop culture. JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE BY KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ MOVIEI tend to think of 1940s fundamentalists as rejecting popular culture, but this hard-drinking, unchurched movie star who avoided military service during World War II shows up repeatedly in the evangelical writers that Du Mez quotes. John Wayne is one such figure, and I was surprised to learn how early and persistent his influence on evangelicals proved to be. This is a book about people who sound like caricatures because, for the sake of influence or fame, they became caricatures. But writing about the many ways of being evangelical simply isn’t her project. Some readers will feel that the texture and diversity of American evangelical experience aren’t represented in the story Du Mez is telling, and they aren’t wrong. Meanwhile, Sunbelt segregationists, Vietnam War enthusiasts, and televangelists were encouraging Christian men to cut their hair and spank their children. Activists like Phyllis Schlafly, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and James Dobson promoted a complementarian view of women and men. The empire needed Christian boys for cannon fodder, so aggression itself was redefined as Christian.ĭu Mez profiles the thinkers and activists who authored this redefinition. To win, it had to make room for militarism and nationalism. This fused evangelicalism was born into a newly ascendant empire. One moment you find him integrating his crusades like a 19th-century Oberlin visionary the next moment he’s maligning Jews on the Nixon White House tapes. Billy Graham symbolizes this fusion, exemplifying its finest and worst traits. One of the ways they rebranded was by calling themselves “evangelicals,” as when several of them formed the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. If so, it’s a lesson that conservatives spent the next century failing to heed.įundamentalists, marginalized as they were, saw the utility of any ideology that licensed them to be aggressive and combative, even as they sought to organize and rebrand. The war fever and nationalism that gripped early 20th-century liberal Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic may have been a sort of object lesson. She begins in the early 20th century, when both liberal and conservative Protestants offered visions of “muscular Christianity.” The liberals lost confidence in this idea after the pointless carnage of World War I, which many of them had foolishly supported and which one of them-Woodrow Wilson-had led us into. How did a movement that, in the 19th century, was synonymous with Methodist feminists and circuit-riding antislavery activists come to be identified with a view of men, America, and history best described as Confederate? How did so many evangelical Christians come not only to tolerate but to like the kind of masculinity that Trump performs? No single book can answer these questions, but Du Mez fills a lot of gaps in the story. Du Mez is facing a problem that besets many ex-evangelicals and former fundamentalists these days: How did the people who taught us to love Jesus end up braying and hooting for this reality television star? Trump hates losers Jesus broke metaphysics in order to become one. This personal aside sets up Jesus and John Wayne as something more than a book of cultural history. But as I watched those in the overflow crowd waving signs, laughing at insults, and shouting back in affirmation, I wondered who these people were. We married in a church just down the road. Standing on the stage where Trump now stood, I had led prayers, performed in Christian “praise teams,” and, during choir rehearsal, flirted with the man who would become my husband. Every year as a child I’d attended Easter sunrise services in that auditorium, and as a college student I faithfully attended chapel services in that same space.
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